Dubai: Game producer Yoshinori Ono finally put an end to his teasing tweets at Games15 on Friday with the news that Street Fighter V will feature an Arab character able to harness the power of the wind.
Rashid is the first Arab character in the legendary franchise, which first appeared in arcades in 1987 and has seen several spin-off films through the years. Nicknamed “The Turbulent Wind”, Rashid’s special powers focus on air, whirlwinds and storms.
The character is one of a handful of new characters announced to join the established line-up of Street Fighter V, due for release in 2016. Capcom also announced they will localise the game for the Middle East, with all in-game text appearing in Arabic.
Ono, the man who persuaded Capcom to resurrect the Street Fighter franchise with the release of Street Fighter IV in 2008, was on his first visit to Dubai.
Before his public announcement on the mains stage of Games15, Ono spoke to Gulf News about the game in an interview conducted through an interpreter.
Street Fighter IV and its spin-offs sold eight million units. Do you expect Street Fighter V to equal or exceed that?
I’d like to exceed that. Also, not just talking about units — I’d love to see 10 million people playing Street Fighter this time around. I’d love to see the number of people who get their hands on the game to go far beyond 10 million.
Why is Street Fighter so special to you?
There’s really two main reasons. The first is that I joined Capcom 22 years ago because I loved Street Fighter. I joined as Street Fighter II came out, so really as the series has developed at the company my career has developed in parallel. Obviously I’ve worked on it for a long time, and I really love the series.
The second one is that [as] someone who was on the Street Fighter III team I regretted that Street Fighter III ended the franchise for a time. That was the reason why I was so passionate about getting Capcom to let me bring it back to life with Street Fighter IV, because I felt somehow responsible for the fact that it ended with Street Fighter III. I felt it was my mission somehow to go on the world stage and bring this game back.
There was something special about Street Fighter II, wasn’t there?
A huge title. I joined the company when Street Fighter II had already come out, and I was on the team in the time of Street Fighter II, so I’m personally aware of what a huge impact that title has had on everything.
Is there no desire to modernise the format of Street Fighter? It’s a side-scrolling fighter. There aren’t that many of them still left. Any plans to take it 3D like Soul Calibur and other fighting games?
Do you follow football or baseball? [Cricket, I tell him; he laughs]
The game’s really important to me, and I feel that the format is something we need to keep and protect. For example, how would you feel if they added a heading-the-ball rule to cricket or if a basket were put out there, and people were suddenly trying to hit the ball into the basket? I think you can imagine that that wouldn’t be cricket, so to speak. You have to keep the format with something like cricket — a sport like cricket or a game like Street Fighter.
You keep the format, but refine it in ways that make sense, so for cricket you could improve the wood you make your bat out of, or you could make the ball more or less bouncy. You can adjust those things to make the sport more fun. In Street Fighter we want to make the graphics better and more intense, we want to improve the online connectivity; those improvements make the most sense within the framework of the format.
You have often likened Street Fighter to a game of chess or go. What do you mean by that?
I’ve compared it in the past to what I would call ‘brain sports’ — chess, go or shogi, Japanese/Chinese chess. The reality is that these things all have a rules set that’s set in stone and within that framework people can strategise and compete against each other in really exciting ways. This new word we’ve seen over the last three years, esports, I think that really applies to Street Fighter. It’s a game that can be played competitively as if it were a sport because it has these rules that you can learn and within those rules there’s an incredible depth for you to get skilled at, get better at and try and compete against someone. Even people who don’t currently play Street Fighter, I’d love to see them play Street Fighter V, help them realise this is the kind of fun they could have — it’s like playing a sport against a like-minded opponent. As long as their brain and their fingers can keep up there’s no limit to how far they can go with it.
The difference with other brain sports being that reflexes are more important …
That’s true. The difference I see is that Shogi is 2,000 years old, chess I think a thousand years old. The background, in which those games were invented, is obviously so different from our era. E stands for electronic and that very word brings to mind very fast-moving, fast-paced image[s], so, yeah, it may not be like a game of chess where you can place a piece and then think for 10 minutes. But what makes a mind sport a mind sport is still there; it’s got a fair set of rules that anyone can learn, so I have that thing in mind as I keep working on the game, as I go forward.
Are there any plans to bring Street Fighter to tablets or smartphones?
One of the key pillars of Street Fighter is controlling your character accurately, and the way that’s been done up until now is with physical button and stick input or on a controller on a console. In order to bring a tablet or smartphone platform where you essentially have one big touch screen as the controls, I think that the only way to make that work would be to get over that hurdle and to get creative, to find some way to make the actual input of controls with accuracy and move your character in the way you want to. If you don’t bring that into a tablet or a smartphone version of a fighting game, you haven’t really made the same game.
It’s something that once we get over that hurdle of making it work on a smartphone or tablet then that’s when we’ll really start thinking about that kind of thing.
Are you actively trying to overcome that hurdle?
Yes, it’s something we’re thinking about internally as we speak. Bringing it to a touch platform is so challenging that you need to find that key idea that actually makes it make sense. The game’s fundamental nature is competition as a sort of esport between two players to see who’s stronger and the way you can make that work. Maybe you need to throw away your preconceived ideas of what it is to control a fighting game character. You’ve got all these tools at your disposal, which you don’t have on traditional platforms: touch input, flipping, side-to-side swipes and even voice input is very rich on these platforms.
The moment we can make all this stuff work, and we think we’ve found the key to this potential smartphone or tablet version of the game that’s worthy of having the Street Fighter name on it, I would announce that the next day, but it’s still something we’re looking at internally.
Another thing that’s important to bear in mind is that when it’s not coming to a platform that’s designed to play games specifically the way people play is very different. Smartphones are in everyone’s life now. You just don’t walk around without your phone in your pocket. You feel lost without it. It’s designed to do so many things. It runs productivity apps, it runs games, you can communicate with people. A game has to fit in with that usage pattern. You don’t sit down with your phone like you would with a console and television, and play for three hours. Not only would it not be viable in terms of your actual device usage patterns, it’s a different feeling you have when you want to play a game. If you want to bring Street Fighter onto a smartphone, you can’t just necessarily port the console game. There has to be something that bears this in mind, a game you play in your downtime so you can know what’s happening in 15 seconds, get a win or loss in a minute and a call comes in and you can take that’s it, you’ve had your game. It’s part of this entire ecosystem that you’re using, so I really think it needs to be considered.
When I speak to Western designers and developers, most of them work with a company for a short time, then move on. When I speak to Japanese designers, many of them have been with one company for their whole career. Am I correct in this view of the Japanese industry and, if so, do you think this is a strength or a weakness?
Your image of Japan, it’s true in the sense that historically that’s been the case. Probably these days Japan is getting a bit more like the West. There’s a bit more turnover of people, maybe, losing their jobs and moving on. Capcom is just past its 30th anniversary as a company, so it’s neither an old nor a very young company, it’s in the middle. It’s not new enough to be having this high turnover, but it’s also not super-old to be offering a complete lifetime of employment from start to finish.
The way I see it is Japan doesn’t really have any natural resources. I mean, we’re here in Dubai where oil comes up out of the ground, and they can sell that [in fact, there is little oil in Dubai]. Japan doesn’t have anything like that. I think Japan’s natural resources is ideas. We take technology and other things that may have been invented elsewhere, but we are able to refine them, apply really great creativity and ideas to them and produce products we can sell anywhere in the world. In order to do that generations have to pass on their know-how to the next generation, whether it be a literal generation or a company generation of employees.
They need to have very close-knit, hard-working teams who have great teamwork, who are on the same page. They know what each other wants to they don’t have to have a long meeting and discuss it. It’s like, when I say something, you know exactly what I mean, and you get the point of what to do.
Those skills and those aspects of life in Japanese companies are definitely a plus because they allow us to work faster and know what to expect from each other. We’re synched mentally; we have a kind of telepathy almost, where we can get things done the way we know we want them done. Yes, I think overall it’s probably a strength of Japanese companies that we have this kind of system.
I would say, on the other hand, that on the negative side, if you have a company that makes cars, like Honda or Toyota, when a new idea comes along, like hybrid cars, it’s still a car so they’re able to adjust themselves to the times and what people want.
The way our industry works is that every generation the hardware changes, and now you’ve got things like smartphones and tablets. You can’t just directly apply your existing knowledge of 20 or 30 years of working on console games to a different device that comes out now, and I’m starting to see that effect happen where, just because a team that’s worked together for 20 or 30 years and have great know-how and are on the same page, it doesn’t automatically just transfer all that knowledge onto the new thing. I’m trying to do what I can at Capcom to offset this a bit, mixing up the team members who work together, trying to get a knowledge exchange happening and keep things a bit fresh, just trying to counteract that slide effect of being unable to deal with the latest advances in technology by having such an ingrained team.
So it’s got its plusses and minuses.
You have in the past been somewhat critical of Capcom’s procedures. Is it useful to be seen by gamers as a rebel?
[He laughs] It’s interesting to think that people might see me as a rebel figure. The way I see it is I’m going out there, talking about the games, and I’m trying to tell everyone how good they are and then they can go out and buy them. At the same time, I’m not going to read a press release to you because if I’m doing that, you can just read it yourself and publish that.
I feel like I have a stance close to that of the players myself, because I play games as well, and I feel like I need to know what players want and what their needs are in order for me to be a better creator. And because I have that stance within myself I push it to the line sometimes, and I’m sure the PR [public relations] people are going like, “Stop talking! Stop talking!”
I try and keep it within the line of acceptability, but I know that people want to hear the truth as well, and they don’t just want to hear a blurb because they can get that anywhere.
When you said the word “rebel” I was surprised. I wouldn’t necessarily want to say something that causes trouble for its own sake, but I feel like I’m just here to say what I’m thinking, say what I mean, and at the same time do my job as someone who’s creating products and hoping you like them and buy them.
